


The Jazz Age

by follow_the_sun



Series: I Can Save Today [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Diana Prince does not help matters, Diana Prince vs. the 20th century, F/F, Gen, I honestly have very little idea where this story is going, I want more Etta Candy, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Probably lots more tagging to come once I figure that out, Steve Rogers' mom puts up with a lot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2018-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-09 10:58:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12886434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun
Summary: They say it takes a village to raise a child. For Steve Rogers, it’s going to take three wonder women.(In which Diana Prince and Steve Rogers save each other, while Etta Candy and Sarah Rogers fight crime in early 20th-century Brooklyn.)





	1. Brooklyn, 1919

**Author's Note:**

> _Philippus: “Any who leave Themyscira can never return. Their immortality is forfeit. She would be a woman in a world of men.”_  
>  _Castalia: “Not the only one. The only Amazon... The men of the world best beware, I should think.”_  
>  —Wonder Woman: Year One, _Greg Rucka_

“It’s even worse than London.”

Diana, Princess of Themyscira—Diana Prince on her traveling papers, which Etta Candy pulled more than one string to obtain, thanks very much—hasn’t stopped staring around New York City in dismay since she stepped off the boat. The city isn’t to Etta’s taste either, but at least she’s spent enough time in cities to build up a tolerance to smog and grime and too many people packed in tight as sardines. Poor Diana, on the other hand, had never seen more than a hundred people together in her whole life before Steve Trevor took her to London. And what a shock it must have been for the poor thing when he hauled her right off the pier and into the heart of one of the most bustling cities on the planet.

Sometimes Etta wants to grab that man by the ear and give him a piece of her mind. And then, of course, she remembers.

“It won’t seem so bad once you get used to it,” she lies, giving Diana a gentle tug into the shelter of a doorway. Etta has long since given up on the notion of making Diana blend in, which is just as well, given that she looks almost as out of place in Brooklyn as she did carrying an actual sword and shield around London. Not even the clothes help much; the smart gray jacket and skirt that Steve bought her in Selfridge’s are both last year’s style and too rich for the neighborhood, giving her an incongruous, if not entirely inaccurate, appearance of nobility fallen on hard times. She won’t give them up, though, any more than she’ll take off the specs she absolutely doesn’t need. Not that Etta can fault her for a touch of sentimentality. Steve gave her precious little to remember him by—at the end of the day, not even a corpse to grieve over.

Given the circumstances, it’s no wonder Diana was so insistent about following up on the letter when it came in through the War Office, even though Etta is afraid she’s about to be dreadfully disappointed. Etta loved Steve very much in her own way, despite wanting to give him a good kick as often as not, and she wishes she could believe this American woman’s story. But for all her study of languages and history and even her time on the battlefields of an actual war, Diana knows very little about the small trials and petty cruelties that make up the day-to-day world. If it turns out that the Rogers woman is lying… well. Etta has no desire to dash Diana’s hopes. The lasso will do that quickly enough.

“That’s it across the way,” she says, pointing to a drab brick building. Honestly, it’s a relief that it isn’t worse. She’s seen Jacob Riis’s photographs of the Lower East Side slums, and she knows that some of New York’s tenements are truly horrific, dark airless rooms with no running water and thirty people to a W.C. This one looks like it was built after the latest round of reforms, with plenty of windows and fire escapes, and the stairs and sidewalk have been swept clean of the slushy January mess that’s settled over Brooklyn.

And speaking of the weather, the sooner they get this done with, the sooner Etta can get back to the hotel and run herself a hot bath. She squares her shoulders and says, “Come on, then, let’s go see about this baby.”

 

The interior of the tenement building is dim and close, but air shafts spaced along the hallway let in beams of thin winter sunlight, and the floor is as clean as soap and elbow grease can make it. They’ve just rounded the last corner of the stairwell when a baby’s cry pierces the thin walls, and Etta braces herself. Sarah Rogers will undoubtedly have quite the sob story to tell, and she won’t be above using the baby to tug at Diana’s heartstrings, which means Etta is the one who’ll have to stay objective about this.

It won’t be easy, because the woman who opens the door is a tiny blonde waif with enormous eyes and a heart-shaped pink mouth: exactly the type of woman Steve did like to keep company with before he met Diana. The blanket-wrapped infant in her arms is putting up a thin, hiccupping wail, and Etta doesn’t have all that much experience of babies, but even she can tell that the cry sounds weaker than it ought to for a healthy six-month-old child.

It doesn’t make a bit of difference to Diana, if she notices at all. She’s been sleepwalking through life since the war ended, but the moment she catches sight of the child, she looks fully awake for the first time in months. “Baby,” she exclaims, rushing past Etta with her arms outstretched, and Sarah very nearly hands her son off to a total stranger before good sense prevails. She takes a step backward, cradling the baby closer.

“I’m sorry, who are you?” she asks, a little sharply, with a hint of an Irish accent around the edges of the words. Not an American woman, then, but a recent arrival; that’s interesting.

Diana is too enamored of the baby to notice the rebuff, but Etta cuts in before things can get more awkward. “Mrs. Joseph Rogers?” she asks, taking the letter out of her handbag. “I’m Etta Candy, and this is Diana Prince, from the War Office in London. We’re—we were—friends of Steve Trevor.”

Sarah Rogers’ face falls. “So it’s true, then,” she says, biting her lower lip. She turns away for a moment, blinking, before she raises her eyes again. “Have they told you how he died?” she asks, keeping her voice carefully steady. “They wouldn’t tell me. All I could find out was that he was gone.”

“I was with him when he fell in battle,” Diana says, reaching out to lay a hand on Sarah’s arm. This time, Sarah doesn’t pull away. “He saved hundreds of lives. He was a great hero.”

“And I’m sure that’s a comfort to him,” Sarah says bitterly, shifting the baby on her shoulder. The blanket slips down, and Etta draws a sharp breath when she gets her first glimpse of his face.

The truth is, Etta has always been a bit baffled when babies are supposed to resemble anybody. She’s lost track of the times she’s nodded along while a friend showed off her newborn and murmured, “Oh, yes, she’s got her daddy’s nose, hasn’t she,” even though, to her eyes, all infants are plump, squishy little things that don’t look like anybody until they’ve grown into their features.

But looking at this baby’s pale little face, all Etta can see is Steve Trevor’s eyes.

 

“I met him in London,” Sarah says. They’re in the front room of the flat, where Sarah has made tea in a chipped dime-store pot. It’s painfully small: chairs and table on one side, cookstove and icebox on the other. A porcelain bathing tub sits in the corner, with a board laid across the top to make a table. “I wanted to be part of the war effort, so I’d volunteered to train as a nurse. I—”

“I’m sorry, dear, there’s just one little thing before we carry on,” Etta cuts in. “Diana, would you, please?”

Diana looks at her with an expression that isn’t _quite_ disappointment, but definitely hovers on the edge of it. “She’ll tell us the truth,” she says.

Not for the first time, Etta finds herself envious of Diana’s relentless faith in humanity. “I don’t doubt it, but, best be sure,” she says, giving Diana a gentle nudge with her elbow.

A frown line appears between Diana’s eyes, but she opens her valise and lifts out the lasso. Golden light fills the room, making the dim, shabby place momentarily warm and almost beautiful, and this time it’s Sarah who reaches out without thinking. Then she draws back and says, “May I?”

“Please,” Etta says, and Sarah lifts a loop of the gleaming rope and twines it around her fingers. “It’s beautiful,” she says, her face lit up in the glow. “Is it radium? I’ve never seen anything else with such a shine.”

“Never mind that, dear. You were saying?”

“Well, I’d run away from home, you see,” Sarah says, and then she looks startled at herself. “I… I went to London because my mother had…” Suddenly, she jerks away from the rope as if she’s been bitten. “What’s it doing to me? Is it fairy magic?”

“No,” Diana says, perfectly serious. “The lasso of Hestia was a gift to my people from the goddess Aphrodite. It compels you to reveal the truth.”

Sarah looks at both of them, shocked, while Etta tries not to smile—it’s not as if either explanation sounds less ridiculous than the other, even though one of them happens to be true. Then Sarah’s eyes narrow and she reaches out and grabs the lasso again, but this time she catches Diana’s hand and wraps several coils around _her_ wrist.

“You think I’m trying to cheat my way onto the widows’ dole,” she says, eyes flashing. “If that’s what you think of me, then why did you come all this way?”

“Because,” Diana says, unflinching, “I loved Steve Trevor, and the baby is all that’s left of him.”

Sarah holds her gaze for a long moment, and for the first time, Etta sees a flash of a will that seems almost strong enough to match Diana’s. Then she seizes a loop of the rope again, almost defiantly. “Well, I can’t say I loved the man,” she says. “But he was handsome and charming, and I was… besotted, I suppose you might say, and perfectly willing to damn the consequences until they came about. Steve had gone off on a mission by the time I learned I was in the family way, but honestly, that was just as well. He would have felt obliged to do right by me. That’s how my mother and da got saddled with each other, and I decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t do that to my child. Because, you see, I may not have loved Steve Trevor, but from the moment I knew about Stevie, I loved _him.”_

As if he knows he’s under discussion, the baby squirms in Sarah’s arms, making a fussy little noise that seems likely to turn into another wail at any second. Sarah turns him around and unbuttons her shirtwaist, leaving the lasso looped around her wrist while she settles him at her breast, and Etta is suddenly unsure where to put her eyes. She tries looking at Diana instead, but what she sees there isn’t exactly comforting. Diana has been hiding it well, but she came out of the war… not broken, exactly, but changed, stronger in some ways and unexpectedly vulnerable in others. She’s been adrift since the war ended, and now she’s looking at the baby the way a drowning man might look at a life raft.

“What happened?” she asks.

“Well, I couldn’t go home,” Sarah says, and whatever the story is there, it seems even the lasso can’t convince her to elaborate. “My mother would have seen me shipped off to a Magdalene laundry by nightfall. And I couldn’t very well stay on at the hospital, even if they would have let me once they realized I was a _fallen woman.”_ She says the words with heavy irony, but with just enough of a pointed edge to them that Etta wonders if that’s really how she sees her situation. “So I asked myself, where do people go when they want a new life? And it turned out I had just enough money tucked away to buy a passage to America.”

“And Joseph Rogers?” Etta asks.

“I met him on the boat,” Sarah says. “And I know what you’ll likely think of me, jumping out of Steve Trevor’s bed and into another man’s, but it wasn’t like that. Joseph was a good, kind man—not that Steve wasn’t, but Joseph wasn’t as… complicated. When he asked me to marry him, I meant to let him down gently, but he was so easy to talk to, and I was lonesome enough, that somehow I found myself telling him all about the trouble I was in. And he said…” She looks away, rubbing the back of one hand over her eyes. “He said that was fine, because he’d always wanted to start a family once he got to America, and I’d just given him a jump on it. If there was ever proof that there are still good men in this world, Joseph Rogers was it. From the day Stevie was born, Joseph treated him as his own. I could have come to love him for that alone, I think, if we’d had more time.”

“How did he die?” Diana prompts gently, after Sarah’s pause goes on for a little too long.

“Spanish flu,” Sarah says. “It hit us all hard, and if Stevie had died of it, I would have thrown myself off a bridge, mortal sin or not. But the one it took was Joseph.” She goes quiet again, and this time, neither Diana nor Etta tries to press her until she resumes. “I’ve been lucky, as far as work goes—there’s always a need for nurses—but every time I manage to put a little aside for the future, Stevie takes sick again, and I end up missing my shifts to tend him just when I need the money for doctors and medicine. The landlord here isn’t a bad man, not like some, but I’ve been late with the rent enough times to run out a saint’s patience. So, yes, when I heard Steve Trevor had passed, I wrote to the War Office and lied about having been his wife to try to get a widow’s pension.” She tilts her chin up and sets her jaw defiantly. “I’d starve and freeze before I asked for money for myself, but there’s nothing on God’s green earth that I wouldn’t do for my son. So if you’re here to tell the police about me, Miss Prince, then do what you have to do, but I won’t say I’m sorry.”

Diana looks at her for a moment, then gathers up the lasso and drops it back into the valise. Etta sighs, because she can already see how this is going to go. “Diana, could I speak to you privately for a moment?” she asks, and Diana looks at her with vague surprise, as if she’s forgotten Etta is there, before she follows her out.

Diana waits for the door to shut before she turns to Etta, a grimly determined expression on her lovely face. “We have to help them,” she says.

“And we will, obviously. It’s just a matter of how we’re going to do it.”

Diana has been working herself up for an argument, and Etta’s response takes all the wind out of her sails. “But you didn’t believe her.”

“Which does seem reasonable, given that she was lying. That doesn’t mean I don’t think she deserves help. She won’t get it through the War Office, though, not without proof of a marriage that doesn’t exist.”

“But the baby is Steve’s son,” Diana begins, and Etta holds up a hand to stop her.

“It doesn’t matter whose baby it is if he wasn’t born in wedlock, Diana. And even if the War Office would accept the lasso as proof, which they won’t—which they _won’t,”_ she repeats, over Diana’s immediate protest, “little Steven Rogers was born while his mother was married to another man, which means that legally, our Steve isn’t his father.”

“That’s ridiculous!” says Diana.

“You’ll get no argument from me,” Etta agrees. “But even if the two of us could change society to be fair to a woman like Sarah, we couldn’t do it overnight. If we want to help her, we’ll have to do it ourselves. And it’s a situation that may call for a bit of delicate handling.” When Diana looks at her blankly, she elaborates, “It’s one thing to ask the War Office for money, but our Mrs. Rogers may be less inclined to take charity from strangers. We’ll have to find a way to get her to accept help for the baby’s sake, but without hurting her pride.” She hesitates, then adds, “Diana, it’s not an easy thing to take on responsibility for a child, particularly one that isn’t your own. Are you quite sure you want to do this? You could go anywhere in the world, you know, and do anything you set your mind to.”

Diana meets Etta’s eyes. “He’s Steve’s son,” she says. “Of course I’m going to help him.”

“Yes,” Etta sighs, “I rather thought you’d say that.” Letting go of that lovely hot bath idea and steeling herself for a long evening, she says, “Well, if we’re in this for the long haul, I suppose we’d better pick up a newspaper on the way back and start looking for work, not to mention a place to live.”

Diana blinks at her, finally really and truly surprised. “We?” she repeats. “But surely you want to go home, Etta. This is my responsibility, not yours.”

Etta closes her eyes briefly. Part of her does already feel like she’s been away too long; there are certain words that are written on the heart, as her mother used to say, words like England, London, _home._ But the deeper truth is that the War changed everything. It wasn’t just a matter of losing Steve, although her unexpected friendship with him saw her through some dark times, and she misses him only a little less than Diana does. She’s lost other friends and family, too, some to the trenches and others in ways less obvious: a shell-shocked cousin who hasn’t spoken since they sent him home from the Front; a grief-stricken sister, formerly Etta’s closest friend and confidante, who can’t accept that her son is buried under the mud in some foreign field and spends her days waiting for a knock on the door that will never come. The War cast a long shadow, one that won’t fade for a long time, and it’s hard to imagine going back to her old life of social calls and afternoon tea and pretending that she hasn’t changed, much less that nothing else has. Maybe Sarah Rogers had the right idea, looking for a fresh start in America.

And Diana does need her. Well, maybe _need_ is a bit of an overstatement. But Diana at least makes her feel needed, and Etta isn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Anyhow, Diana can’t go home, from what little she’s said about her past, and the very least Etta Candy can do for the woman who saved the world is help her find her feet, even if it does mean spending a little longer than she planned in this grimy little borough of Brooklyn.

“I do hate to mention this,” she says, “but even if we could just hand Sarah the money, we don’t have much left between us.” It’s a good thing she isn’t under the lasso’s power, because that’s a little more than a polite fib: all of the money is Etta’s, and while she doesn’t mind spending it, it is dwindling rather quickly. “If we want to help her over the long term, we’ll both need to find work. I certainly can’t support four of us alone. I’ve got a good letter of reference, but no secretary alive earns the money she’s worth. I’d venture to say few women do, really.”

“Then they should be paid more.”

“From your lips to God’s ears, dear, but that won’t happen overnight, either. That’s one reason it’s important to find work you can take satisfaction in. They won’t pay you to fight, now that the war’s over. Is there anything else you think you might like to do, Diana? As a career, I mean.”

Diana frowns. (Even frowning, Etta thinks, she’s breathtaking, but that’s neither here nor there.) “I’d like to work with children,” she says. “Do you think I could be a teacher?”

“You know, that might just suit you, Diana.”

Diana smiles. “Where is the school where children learn how to fight?” she asks eagerly.

Etta takes a deep breath. “Let’s think this over a little more,” she says. “I’m sure we’ll come up with something.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um, hi!
> 
> This was supposed to be my NaNoWriMo project for 2017, but life kept happening and I met less than 5% of the goal. But this story is obviously not going to leave me alone until I get it out of my brain and onto paper, so here we are. 
> 
> I really don't have a good idea of where I'm going with it; so far it feels very different from what I usually write, and is heavily focused on minor characters without a lot of canon to them. I can tell you that it's an expansion of [this thing,](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11084028) and heavily inspired by Jaxington's [Roll On](http://archiveofourown.org/series/540190) series. And, of course, by the idea that Steve Rogers' mother probably put up with a lot, and Diana would not exactly be a moderating influence.


	2. A Complicated Man

Diana walks into the museum, stops, and turns in a slow circle, staring at the room around her. The entrance hall is palatial, white marble walls lined with statuary niches and a glass pyramid for a ceiling, and even though she’s still hemmed in by four walls, her feeling of being crowded on all sides has abated for the first time since her ship reached New York Harbor. Etta keeps promising her grand sights in New York, a show at the Lyceum and high tea at the Plaza Hotel, but so far, every building seems to be designed with one goal in mind: to pack as many people as possible into the smallest amount of space. The museum is different. This is a place that was made to preserve beauty, and to celebrate it. Sarah Rogers goes to a puzzling ritual she calls Mass twice a week, and Etta puts on her best dress on Sunday morning and bustles off to something called a worship service, but this is the first time since Themyscira that Diana has felt an urge to whisper a prayer to Artemis and Athena, thanking them for gracing the world of men with beauty.

“A little overwhelming, isn’t it?” a voice speaks up behind Diana, and she turns. The man standing next to her sports a gray beard and a rumpled suit, and although she’s wary of trusting first impressions too much after her disastrous failure to recognize Ares, she can’t help thinking, _His eyes are kind._ “Your first time here?”

“Yes,” Diana says, meaning the museum, but also Brooklyn, New York, America.

“I walk through these doors every day, and I never get tired of it.” He holds out his hand, and she shakes it. “Herbert Carnahan. Curator of the Egyptology wing.”

“Diana Prince.” It still feels strange on her tongue, this borrowed name, but it serves its purpose. “ﺳﻌﺪﺕ ﺑﻠﻘﺎﺋﻚ.”

“You speak Arabic,” the curator says, surprised.

“I speak—” Just in time, Diana remembers Etta’s admonition about _blending in_ and says, “—several languages.”

“Which, if I may ask?”

“Greek,” Diana begins. “Latin, Sanskrit, Sumerian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Assyrian—”

“Stop, stop,” Carnahan says, chuckling. “You’ll embarrass an old man who only knows five. You must be a visiting researcher, then. Oxford? Cambridge?”

“I’m here about a job,” says Diana. She offers Carnahan the newspaper Etta gave her, with the HELP WANTED section folded outward and the museum job circled in red ink.

Carnahan glances at it and snorts. “‘Wanted at once: ticket booth attendants. Young ladies of pleasant appearance and demeanor to apply in person.’ Well, I don’t have to ask myself who wrote that advertisement. Smug son of a—” He catches himself, and finishes, “Our esteemed director would want to have a look at the new hires, decide if they’re attractive enough to represent _his_ museum. But I’m sure a young lady with your qualifications can do better than making change in a ticket booth, Miss Prince. Where were you educated?”

“Themyscira.” When he looks at her blankly, she says, “That was my home. My mother taught me.”

“Your mother must have been quite a woman.” Diana doesn’t disagree, and he goes on, “No degree, then, I take it. What about previous employment? References?”

“I have none.” Once again, she repeats what Etta told her to say: “I came to New York after the war.” Enough people have been uprooted by the Great War that merely hinting at it usually forestalls further questioning.

He looks her up and down—not leering, just thinking, a difference she’s come to appreciate. Then he takes a small book out of his jacket, opens it to a particular page, and hands it to her. “Could you read this in English?”

Diana frowns at it. Surely Homer has been translated before, dozens of times, perhaps. “Is this a test?” she asks.

“Yes,” Carnahan says.

Diana holds back a sigh. Everything in America seems to be a trial. But she needs to earn money to help little Stevie Rogers, and if this man who works in the museum can help her, she’ll jump through any number of hoops. She takes the book, draws a deep breath, and reads,

 _“Tell me about a complicated man._  
_Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost_  
_when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,_  
_and where he went, and who he met,_  
_the pain he suffered in the storms at sea,_  
_and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home._  
_He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,_  
_they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god kept them from home._  
_Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times._ _  
Find the beginning.”_

She stops there, surprised by the catch in her own voice. Carnahan doesn’t seem to notice; he’s deep in thought, and after a moment, he nods.

“You can put away the newspaper, Miss Prince,” he says. “I have a better job for you.”

 

An hour later, Diana picks her way across the slippery pavement in front of the tenement building, rubbing her hands together for warmth. On Themyscira, the mountaintops were cold at night, but not for months at a stretch, and the novelty of snow wears off quickly once it settles on the streets and condenses into ashy gray slush. Etta gave her fifty cents for taxi fare, but she likes riding in the metal machines New Yorkers call _checkered cabs_ even less than she likes the undignified jumping around she has to do to hail one—and Etta was also very clear that she isn’t allowed to step in front of one and let it hit her, even if it’s going far too slowly to be damaged by a sudden stop.

According to Etta, the world of men has a lot of ridiculous rules.

She stomps the worst of the snow off her boots before she enters the building and makes her way up the stairs to the apartment, where Sarah Rogers throws open the door almost before she knocks. “Diana! You look half frozen, come in and warm up,” she orders, and in seconds, Diana finds her coat and scarf stripped off and replaced with a cup of tea and a chair near the oven. “How did it go? Did you find work?”

“Better than I hoped for.” Diana hasn’t quite figured out everybody’s obsession with tea, but she sips it anyway, to be polite. “I met a professor who wants me to help him study artifacts. He’ll teach me how to preserve them, and I’ll help him translate inscriptions. And when he doesn’t need me, I’ll give tours of the exhibits.” Honestly, that pleased her even more than the salary Carnahan offered her, which is much more than Etta told her to insist on. She found out quickly that nobody will give her work as a teacher, not without papers and references she doesn’t have, but here’s a way she can spend at least some of her days talking to children. “I’m certain that the gods arranged our meeting.”

“There’s only one God, Diana,” Sarah says firmly, “and I don’t think he acts anything like Zeus. I’m glad you found work, though. I hope Etta’s had as much luck.”

Diana briefly considers putting up an argument, but it won’t change Sarah’s mind, and anyway, the spot by the stove is too deliciously warm and comfortable to let her stay agitated. “May I hold the baby?” she asks instead.

“Of course.” For all Sarah’s wariness of the two strangers who just walked into her life a few days earlier, making a fuss over Stevie is still the fastest way to her heart. She lifts the baby out of his cradle, where he’s been inspecting his toes with great seriousness, and sets him down on Diana’s lap. “He’s teething, so he’ll be fussy,” she warns.

“It’s all right.” Diana opens her valise and offers Stevie a coil of the golden lasso, which he seizes in a ferocious grip and immediately puts into his mouth. A sudden sense of vertigo hits her when she realizes that every person she’s passed on the Brooklyn streets started out as small and helpless as this, once—including herself. Now that she’s actually spending time with a baby, she sees the absurdity of her mother’s fiction about carving her out of clay. Baby humans are a completely different kind of miracle. And this one is made even greater by the fact that he holds a piece of his father inside him—found again, like Odysseus, after she thought all of him was gone for good.

“Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost,” she murmurs to him, and Sarah glances at her.

“What’s that, Diana?”

“Nothing. An old poem.”

“Diana,” Sarah begins, stops, and starts again. “I understand you’re from a place that’s… different from here. And I don’t want to sound ungrateful; I know you want to do for Stevie out of memory of Steve— _your_ Steve.”

“Yours too,” Diana says.

“Oh, let’s not lie to ourselves, Diana. I know which of us loved him, and I think I can guess which of us he loved back. But Stevie is my son, and I need to know you’ll respect how I want him raised. Not with these stories about other gods, and certainly not learning how to fight. What his father did in the war, what Etta says _you_ did in the war, those were great things, brave things, but so many men marched off to the front dreaming of glory and came back in pieces, Diana. Not just the dead, but the ones who’d been gassed, or burned, or broken from shell shock. Part of the reason I didn’t go back to Ireland after the War is because I was in Dublin for the Easter Rising, and I think things there will only get worse. I wanted my son to grow up in America because here, at least, I thought he’d have a chance to learn that fighting isn’t the only way to be a man.”

Diana looks at Sarah for a long moment. Then she reaches out, cradling Stevie with one arm, and takes Sarah’s scarred, work-roughened hand in her own sword-callused one. “I fought to end the war before it consumed the whole world,” she says. “The only reason Stevie should ever fight is to help those who can’t fight for themselves. Is that a thing we agree on, Sarah Rogers?”

Sarah meets her gaze with equal intensity for the space of a few heartbeats, but then she looks away. “I just need you to understand,” she says, quietly, “that I can’t lose him like we lost his father. It would kill me.”

“I won’t let you,” Diana promises. “I swear by my gods and by yours.”

Sarah looks like she has more to say on the subject, but before she can find the words, they’re interrupted by a knock on the door: Etta, who bustles in with a sack of groceries and a satisfied expression. “Hello, you three,” she begins cheerfully, then stops, looking at Stevie. “Are we sure that chewing on the glowing gold lasso is good for the baby?”

Sarah snorts. “Knowing my baby, I’m more worried about the rope. And you don’t have to bring us supper,” she adds, eyeing the grocery sack. “We’re doing fine on food, Stevie and me.”

“Nonsense,” says Etta. “We’re celebrating. I’ve found us a place to live. A very nice row house on Willow Street. It won’t be what you’re used to,” she tells Diana apologetically, “but it’s only ten minutes’ walk from here, and the rent is good.”

“I’m sure it’s perfect.” Diana has been trying for months to correct Etta’s misapprehensions about what princesses are “used to” on Themyscira, and that’s not even mentioning that after the Front, anything that isn’t a boat or a tent or a half-bombed building still feels like luxury.

“So you’ve found work too?” Sarah asks.

“As secretary to one of the city councilmen,” Etta confirms. “Of course, it won’t be like…” She catches herself, but for a moment, Diana can almost believe she feels the ghost of Steve Trevor hovering beside her in the tiny parlor, the unlikely man—the wonderful, aggravating, _complicated_ man—who’s managed to bind these three women together. Then the moment passes, and Etta says firmly, “It won’t be like the war effort, but there’s plenty of important work to be done in running a city. And who knows? Maybe I can put in a word for suffrage while I’m at it.”

“You’re a social reformer?” Sarah says, perking up.

“Well, I don’t know that I’d go that far,” Etta says, “but we’ve all got a certain amount of responsibility to society as a whole, don’t we?”

“That’s just what I keep saying,” Sarah says, suddenly energized. “People think we come to America expecting the streets to be paved with gold, but all I wanted was a chance. And too many of the people I see in the hospital don’t even have that.”

“The first step is getting women the vote, _I_ think,” Etta says, and then they’re off on a conversation about _public health_ and _civic improvement_ that Diana knows she can’t hope to follow, so she doesn’t try. She strokes Stevie’s blonde hair instead, watching his baby eyes follow the twists and turns of the gold lasso, and thinks about finding the beginning.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because everyone loves a fanfic featuring museum office politics!
> 
> Diana's translation of the prologue to _The Odyssey_ is from the [new edition by Emily Wilson,](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/08/the-odyssey-translated-emily-wilson-review?CMP=share_btn_tw) which looks way more interesting than the one I slogged through in college.
> 
> I asked a friend who's learning Arabic for a translation of a general greeting (literally "I am glad to meet you") and as per the First Law of Fanfic Research, we went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out which dialect would be taught on Themyscira. She settled on Modern Standard Arabic, which apparently nobody actually speaks as a native language but is used as a taught/print language, the theory being that this is as close to a version from before dialects evolved as we can reasonably get. (She declined credit for the mission assist but says she uses Mango Languages.)
> 
> Why, yes, since you ask, Dr. Carnahan is related to Evie from _The Mummy._
> 
> As always, I screamed at Beradan, Robyngoodfellow, and Wrenlet a lot while working on this.


	3. Columbia

“Diana? Are you ready to—” Etta comes out of the kitchen and stops dead when she sees the Princess of Themyscira up to the elbows in an unholy mess that used to be a skein of yarn. Diana looks like she’s on the verge of jerking her braceleted wrists apart to tear herself free, and Etta hurries over to stop her before she can destroy the project completely. “Knitting isn’t going so well?” she says, picking up the tangle of wool.

“It isn’t working,” Diana says, looking at the yarn as if it’s personally betrayed her. “I’m terrible at this.”

“Oh, it’s not that bad,” Etta says, running her fingers over what might be the start of a lovely warm scarf, if the wearer was in a forgiving mood. When Diana frowns at her, she follows up with, “All right, so it’s not that good, either, but you’re only just getting started. It looks like you were doing fine up to this bit. What happened there?”

“The yarn caught in my bracelets,” Diana says.

“There, you see? That could happen to anyone.”

“Then I dropped the yarn while I was trying to untangle them,” Diana continues doggedly, “and when I got up to _get_ the yarn, I dropped a needle and it rolled away—”

“Oh dear.”

“—And by the time I found it and tried to start again, it had done _this.”_ Diana glowers. “The Lasso of Hestia isn’t nearly this uncooperative.”

“I promise, it does get easier with practice,” Etta says, once she’s sure she’s managed to smother any trace of laughter in her voice. “Bring it along to Sarah’s. I’m sure she’ll help you untangle it after the rally.”

Diana gives the yarn a baleful look, but she picks up the skein, retrieves the needle that’s rolled across the parlor floor again while they’ve been talking, and drops the whole business into her valise, shoving it in beside the lasso as if she expects it to give the stubborn thing a good talking-to. “I still don’t understand why we have to do this,” she tells Etta, as she pulls on her coat.

“We’re doing it to be visible, dear. We’re reminding the men of the government that women are half the population and we’re united in thinking that—”

“I understand that the march is about getting women the right to vote,” Diana interrupts. “I don’t understand why we don’t already have it. Who thought it was a good idea to put men in charge of everything?”

“Well, I certainly wasn’t consulted.” Etta stops in front of the mirror by the door, settles her hat on her head, and pierces it with a hatpin. “I think part of this mess is that we _don’t_ stop to think. Too many men want to grab up any power they can get, any way they can get it, and too many women are so worn down just from trying to survive that they don’t have the energy left to fight for what they deserve. That’s why it’s so important for those of us who can to take up the cause, and to make sure we’re properly loud about it, too.”

Diana nods. On that front, they’ve always been in agreement. “Do you really think this will be enough to make your Woodsman Wilson change his mind?” she asks, following Etta out into the hallway.

“It’s Woodrow, dear, and no, I don’t. Not _this_ march, not _this_ time. It’s doing it over and over and never letting up that’s going to make our point. They can’t keep shutting the door in our faces forever.”

“This matters very much to you,” Diana says. It’s not a question or an observation so much as an invitation to say more, and Etta appreciates the thought. But she can’t take Diana up on it, because the fact is, the cause has become more personal for her lately, and the reason has to do with her job.

Etta _hates_ her job.

It isn’t the work itself, although she has to admit that since she got a taste of mission planning in the War Office, typing and filing do seem unbearably dull. Still, one war ought to be enough excitement to last a lifetime, and she thinks she’d be able to settle in and be content if she didn’t have to work for for Big Charlie.

When she applied for the secretarial opening with the the City Council, Etta expected that American politicians would be more, well, more like Steve Trevor: loud and brash and impatient, maybe even a little rude at times, but driven by a genuine desire to do some good in the world. But the man who signs his letters _C. E. Sterling, Brooklyn City Council_ is a far cry from Steve Trevor. Instead, he’s a smug, slightly little greasy man in a cheap suit who looked Etta up and down once, said, “This is the new girl? Not much to look at, is she?”, and slapped Louisa, the mousy young woman who’s the head of the typing pool, on the bottom before he breezed out of the office again.

Even that Etta could have dealt with, if that was as far as it went. The day that really tore it, though, was the day Sterling had a visitor: one of the many local businessmen who were always in and out of the office, reeking of beer and cigar smoke and claiming vital business that had to be discussed behind closed doors. She’d been bending over the filing cabinet when he came in, and the guest must have asked who she was, because she heard Sterling reply, “Oh, the new girl? She’s a Brit, name’s Etta Candy.” And Etta had had just enough time to be pleased that he’d actually remembered her name before the friend snorted. “Et more than one, if you ask me,” he’d said, and Sterling…well, Sterling had closed the office door, but not before she heard him laugh like it was the funniest thing in the world.

Etta knows that she’s no great beauty, and after more than twenty years as a working woman in a man’s world, she no longer expects anyone to come to her defense, certainly not her employer. But given all the things she does for him every day, all the little errors she quietly corrects in his correspondence and the excuses she makes to the people who come by with legitimate council business that isn’t getting done, she really doesn’t think she’s asking for much in return. Only to be allowed to do her job with a little dignity, and not to be laughed at; that’s all she wants, and Sterling couldn’t even manage that.

Diana would force her to quit if she had the slightest inkling of what Etta’s been dealing with, and she’d be right. In fact, on the day it happened, Etta steamed about it all the way to Sarah’s flat, planning the speech she was going to give about why she couldn’t endure another moment of it. But then Sarah opened the door hollow-eyed with worry, cradling little Stevie, who was fever-flushed and wailing in abject misery. When Etta asked her what the doctor had to say about it, Sarah cringed, then launched into a complicated story about why she hadn’t had him in yet. Etta, who knows Sarah well enough now to see through her excuses, set her jaw and said, “For heaven’s sake, Sarah, if money’s the problem, I’ll pay for it,” and Sarah looked at her so gratefully that she realized there was no way she could give up her job. If Sarah—if _Stevie_ needs her help, then Etta will be ready, come hell or high water. And if that means enduring a few indignities for her five dollars a day, well, then, so be it.

At least this time, when they reach the tenement, she has the satisfaction of seeing Sarah swing the door open with a bright, genuine smile. Stevie is balanced on her hip, but it’s Diana his chubby little fists reach for. “Danna!” he says, and Diana scoops him up and swings him around, which earns her a burbling laugh from the baby.

“I swear, that child likes you better than me,” Sarah says, and when Diana looks startled and then immediately guilty, she laughs and shakes her head. “Oh, no, that’s not a bad thing. You can help me deal with him once he learns the word ‘no.’”

“So he’s all better, then?” Etta says.

“Back to himself, full of piss and vinegar and ready to help us change the world. Diana, I thought maybe you’d carry him so I could hold a sign.” Sarah brings out a sheet of pasteboard attached to a stick. The top half is a drawing of a mother cradling a smiling infant that looks suspiciously like Stevie, now that he’s started to grow into his features; the careful lettering below the image reads, _Women Bring All Voters Into the World._

Etta allows herself a gasp of admiration. “Where did you get this?”

“I made it,” Sarah says, and when Etta stares at her, she elaborates, “It’s nothing, just a copy of one I saw at our last march, and that  one was much better done.”

“Nonsense,” Etta says. “Sarah, you’ve been holding out on us. You should be an artist.”

“Now there’s your nonsense,” Sarah says, but her fair skin isn’t suited to hiding a blush. She hands the sign to Etta while she settles a knitted cap over Stevie’s downy blonde hair. Etta recognizes the pattern, and frowns—so that’s what Diana was trying to accomplish with the tangle of yarn in her valise. Fortunately, Sarah doesn’t notice the murderous look Diana shoots at the hat. “There you are, boyo,” she says, tapping the tip of his nose with her fingertip. “Ready to fight for the cause of righteousness today, are you?”

“Ba,” says Stevie, which Sarah seems to find satisfactory.

 

Diana isn’t the type to be intimidated by crowds—or anything else, for that matter—but Etta, who grew up in London, is always surprised by how distracted Diana is by the people on the streets. Or, rather, not distracted, but focused on all the wrong things. Or, rather, not the wrong things, but the things that aren’t carriages or streetcars that are likely to run her down. “If you gave her the baby thinking he’d make her more careful,” she murmurs to Sarah, after the fourth or fifth time she’s grabbed Diana and hauled her back to the sidewalk, “I think you may have miscalculated.”

“I thought he’d slow her down,” Sarah agrees. “Oh, don’t look like that, Etta. She’d throw herself between him and any real danger, and you said yourself she’s indestructible.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s got to try,” Etta sighs. “Diana. _Diana!”_ She finally gives up, marches down the sidewalk, and tugs on Diana’s arm. “Assuming we’re not planning on absconding with a baby this morning, maybe we could think about sticking a bit closer to his mother, yes?”

Diana blinks, making an _O_ with her mouth, as if she’d momentarily forgotten they were there. “Of course,” she says, falling into step beside Sarah again.

Etta can understand why she might be feeling overwhelmed. The march’s route is nearly a mile—she still can’t bring herself to calculate distances in city blocks—so it’s hard to get a sense of how many women have come out for this, but once they start to converge in front of City Hall, Etta thinks, _hundreds._ And this is only Brooklyn. Across the river in Manhattan, there’ll be hundreds more, maybe thousands. The end of the war has added a new fervor to the movement, a feeling that women have to stand up for themselves, especially now that so many young wives have found themselves shockingly young widows. Etta tries not to be bitter about the fact that _she_ realized she couldn’t rely on men to save her decades ago, and that the same friends who are now marching in London used to give her pitying looks when she talked about suffrage, as if they thought her unseemly political fervor was understandable because it was all she had.

“Who is that?” Diana asks, and Etta is so lost in her thoughts that she almost doesn’t hear.

“Oh, the woman dressed as Columbia?” she says, following Diana’s gaze. It’s not unusual for the occasional suffragette to show up in a costume of her own devising to make a point. This one has committed to the look, wearing a carefully draped Grecian gown and carrying a cutout pasteboard shield instead of a sign. “She’s rather lovely, isn’t she?”

“You told me Americans didn’t believe in goddesses,” Diana says.

“She’s not a goddess,” Etta says quickly, mindful of Sarah’s quiet disapproval beside her. She and Diana have agreed to disagree about religion, but there’s no reason to stir all of that up today. “She’s a symbol—the personification of America, of liberty, the way Britannia is for England. It’s a clever statement, Freedom herself not having the vote. Oh, here we are,” she says, as the line of women begins to slow down and spread through the square in front of City Hall—and then she stops, staring.

“What’s wrong, Etta?” Sarah asks, surprising her; she hadn’t thought Sarah was so mindful of her moods. Or maybe she’s just utterly failing to keep her feelings off her face. Not that she can be blamed for it. It’s bad enough the march had to bring her to her workplace on her day off, but now, standing on the platform the local suffragettes’ chapter set up in front of the council building for _their_ speakers, is Big Charlie himself. He’s flanked by a few other businessmen, all of them clearly there to hold the platform and make it impossible for the women to speak as planned, and it’s a good thing Etta can’t possibly hate Sterling any more than she already does, because if she could, she honestly feels she might burst into flame.

“That’s the man I work for,” she says shortly.

Big Charlie must have been speaking for a while now, because he’s really rolling, the way Etta has seen him do at city council meetings when he’s fortified himself with a few stiff drinks. “Now, it’s not that I’m opposed to women, of course,” he’s saying, to a chorus of boos from the growing crowd. “I’m married to one, after all.”

_Yes, and you love her so much that you spend two nights a week in a secret flat in Bed-Stuy,_ Etta thinks, and clamps her mouth firmly shut before it can betray her.

“In fact, it’s because I love her so much that I don’t want her mixed up in politics,” Sterling goes on. A number of women in the crowd are muttering angrily, but the men with him are nodding along. “What good does it do our city to have our women out in the streets, neglecting their husbands and children?”

Etta grinds her teeth. Beside her, Diana is speechless with shock; Sarah, who worked six nights last week at the hospital to keep a roof over her child’s head, is also speechless, but with rage. And Sterling isn’t done yet. “Why, didn’t God Himself tell us that a man is to be the head of the household, and that his wife is to be obedient to him?”

“Does he truly believe these things?” Diana whispers, aghast.

“In my experience,” Sarah mutters, “men like that don’t believe in a damn thing except themselves.”

“But that isn’t what the Christian Bible says at all,” says Diana. “I’ve read it! In Greek!” She starts to move forward, and Etta is so busy trying to stop her from storming onto the platform, still holding the baby on her hip, that she almost misses the very worst part.

“And if women were given the vote,” Sterling is saying, just as she tunes back in, “what would they really have to contribute to politics? Now, we all agree that there’s no more important job than being a mother, I’m sure, and there are other important jobs for women as well. But imagine if we found a nurse, or a cook, or a secretary and took her advice about how to run the country!”

What happens next will be a point of contention among the three women for about the next two years. Etta insists that there’s simply no way she would have done something like this on her own, and that Diana must have done something to her with the golden lasso; Diana will be equally adamant—will even wrap the lasso around her own wrist and swear—that she did no such thing, and that Etta’s actions were all her own. (Sarah will stay out of the argument, except to say that she’s frankly amazed that the banshees weren’t wailing for the man who was so clearly determined to dig his own grave.) But why it happens doesn’t matter as much as what happens, which is that Etta shouts, “Oh, if you didn’t have a secretary you wouldn’t be able to find your own bottom with both hands, you ignorant turnip!”

To say there’s a moment of stunned silence, both in the crowd and on the stage, would be an understatement.

Standing in the middle of a sea of silent women, Etta claps both hands over her mouth. _Oh, you’ve done it now, haven’t you,_ the little voice in the back of her head whispers—the one that always sounds a little like her aunt Lavinia, shaking her head in disapproval. _Ruined everything, just like always. Don’t even bother going in to collect your things in the morning, he’ll see to it that you never work in Brooklyn again, and what use will you be to Sarah now? That’s the end of that, and rightly so, because this is just like you, not being able to keep your mouth shut._

And then, suddenly, there’s another voice, a voice that sounds very much like Steve Trevor, which says, _Well, I guess that means you’ve got nothing left to lose, right?_

By the time Sterling has mouthed, “Candy?” in shock and turned to look at his friends as if he needs confirmation that he’s not seeing things, Etta has already started to elbow her way through the crowd, which parts for her like the Red Sea for Moses. “And as for what women have to contribute to politics,” she says, as she steps up onto the platform, “I can think of a few things, to start with. How many people here remember the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory?” Etta herself wasn’t in New York at the time, but considering she read about it in the London papers, she’s not surprised when hands go up all over the square. “And who stood up after that and demanded the reforms that made all of our factories safer? Women, that’s who. Who’s been working to reform the tenements _we_ live in, to promote public health, to put roofs over the heads of the orphans who’d otherwise be left on the streets? _Women._ Of course we haven’t done anything properly glorious, like starting a Great War, but imagine what we could do if we weren’t always so bloody busy cleaning up men’s messes!”

It’s not a good speech, by Etta’s reckoning: it’s all passion with no facts at all to back it up. So it comes as a very great shock when a few of the women in the crowd actually cheer for her—and when even more of them who start to boo as Sterling steps toward her. Mindful of the crowd, he stops just short of grabbing her wrist and pastes on one of the most obviously false smiles she’s ever seen. “Now, now,” he says, loud enough for any reporters in the crowd to catch, as if the boos in the crowd were for Etta and not for him. “Obviously the lady and I disagree in principle, but that doesn’t mean we can’t respect each other.” He holds out his hand, and Etta, raised on manners, finds herself instinctively reaching out to shake it before she can stop herself. Sterling has held onto his job for a long time, though, at least in part because he knows exactly how to make appearances count. Using the gesture to tug her closer, he smiles broadly and benignly at the audience while he tells her, through clenched teeth, “Consider your employment ended, Miss Candy.”

Etta offers him a poisonously sweet smile of her own. “A word to the wise, Mr. Sterling,” she says, matching his volume. “If I had a mistress, I’d consider hiding her somewhere further away from my wife than Bedford-Stuyvesant. No need for that, gentlemen, I was just leaving,” she adds, loudly, to the two large men—Sterling’s security, no doubt—who are moving purposely toward her from the rear of the platform. She’ll keep her dignity long enough to get down the stairs, at least. And she does manage to step down onto the sidewalk under her own steam and walk a little bit away before her knees buckle.

It doesn’t surprise her when Diana catches her by the arm before she can fall; it does surprise her a little that Sarah is right there on her other side. “Etta, that was incredible,” she says. “Every woman here was wishing she was you, having the courage to march right up there and say those things to that awful man’s face.”

“Secretaries aren’t supposed to be incredible.” Now that the moment is gone, Etta is feeling decidedly wobbly. “We’re supposed to get things done.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t keep trying to be a secretary.”

Sarah’s tone is serious, but Etta forces a laugh anyway. “That won’t be a problem, because ‘that awful man’ just sacked me. And what are we supposed to do for money now, I wonder?”

“Oh,” Sarah says, “among the three of us, I’m sure we can think of something.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section was supposed to cover twice as much plot as it actually does, but as I haven't posted anything yet _this year_ (thanks, seasonal affective disorder!), I'm kicking it out the door so this poor little labor-of-love fic stops looking like it's been abandoned, and Etta's new career trajectory and the burning question of whether Diana ever learns to knit will be broken off into another chapter.
> 
> All the usual shout-outs to beradan and robyngoodfellow, eternally patient shieldmaidens in the good fight against WIPs that go way too long between updates.


	4. The Sidewalks of New York

Etta wakes to the sound of loud, insistent rapping on the front door, and she groans as she pushed herself upright. She’s really too old to fall asleep on the sofa, but after hours of lying awake and staring at the ceiling, getting up to scour the paper for job listings one more time by gaslight had seemed perfectly reasonable. And she’d meant to be back in her own bed before Diana left for work, but there’s a blanket over her that she knew she didn’t put there, which means Diana found her there but left without waking her, which means she’s worried Diana, which means she’s a dreadful friend. “Oh, do stop,” she calls to whoever thinks it’s reasonable to make so much noise at this hour, tying the sash of her robe and hurrying toward the door.

She opens it, squinting in the sunlight, to find Sarah Rogers on the stoop, the arm that usually holds Stevie instead hooked around a manila folder. “I was getting worried,” she says, nudging Etta aside and stepping into the parlor. “You ought to keep a key under the mat for emergencies.”

“So anybody could find it and walk in? Nonsense. Diana’s got too many things here that can’t be replaced,” Etta says, before she realizes what it implies: that poor Sarah has nothing irreplaceable. Sarah doesn’t take offense, though, or even seem to notice. She’s already opened the folder and spread several papers out on the little dining table, pushing aside yesterday’s cups and saucers. Etta, who really meant to get on top of the washing-up now that she doesn’t have a job, winces at the rattle of china, but says nothing. She’s never seen Sarah looking like she does now, with her blonde hair windblown and her cheeks flushed with excitement. “Sarah, what on earth are you up to?”

“I know what your next job’s going to be,” Sarah says, thrusting the papers at her. “If that horse’s ass Sterling thinks he can get rid of you, then we’ll get rid of _him._ You’re going to run against him in the council election.”

“What?” Etta snaps to attention, knocking one of the teacups flying; cold tea spills everywhere, but Sarah catches the cup before it quite goes over the edge. “Oh, Sarah, that’s nonsense. If they won’t let a woman vote for City Council, they certainly won’t let one run.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. They might be able to keep us from voting, but it hasn’t even occurred to them that we might want to be voted _for._ Which means,” Sarah says triumphantly, “that there’s no law against it. There’s already been a woman in Congress; her name’s Jeannette Rankin, her term just ended in March. You’d think that would have put the men wise to us, but no, the Council bylaws only say you’ve got to reside in Brooklyn. I’ve already started the paperwork, so all you’ve got to do is take this form and sign it.”

“Sarah…” Etta sighs, but somehow she already has the paper is in one hand and a pen in the other, and her eyes are skimming the lines before she knows exactly what’s happening. “Oh! Well, I can’t sign this one anyway. You’ve got my birthday wrong.”

“No, it’s right. I looked at your passport. August eighth, eighteen-eighty-nine.”

“Eighteen- _seventy_ -nine _._ I’m forty years old, Sarah.”

Sarah blinks, then laughs. “No, you’re not.”

“I think I should know!”

“What, truly? You don’t look a day over thirty to me.”

“Truly. But thank you, I suppose. I’m still not…” Etta stops. Somewhere in there, Sarah took advantage of her distraction to correct the date and hand the form back to her—and her secretary’s instincts must have kicked in, because she’s already signed on the dotted line as if the form was any old requisition. “I’m not convinced we’ve thought this through,” she protests, but the form has already disappeared back into the folder, and Sarah is giving her a blatantly smug look.

“There. Now all we just need two hundred signatures on our petition and take it to the courthouse, and you’re officially a candidate.”

“Two hun—Sarah, I don’t think I know two dozen people in Brooklyn, much less two hundred!”

“That’s all right,” Sarah said, shuffling the papers  back into place. “I’ve got a plan for that.”

 

“Of course this is the perfect place to start,” Etta murmurs, following Sarah through the doorway. “Bracelets can stop bullets, babies are made of clay, and women campaign for public office in saloons on Middagh Street.”

“It isn’t just any saloon,” Sarah says, and turns to smile at the man behind the counter. “Hello, Pat, you ugly bastard.”

“Sarah! My darling.” The owner is a big, red-bearded man, and his Irish accent is even thicker than Sarah’s. He comes out from behind the bar to envelop her in a crushing hug. “Early for you to be in. You’ll have the usual, then?”

“Don’t be terrible, Pat, it’s not even lunchtime yet.” Sarah tugs Etta forward. “This is my friend, Etta Candy. She’s going to run against Big Charlie for City Council, and we need your help getting the signatures to get her on the ballot.”

“Is she now?” Pat looks Etta up and down. “You’re the one who stood up at the women’s rally.”

“Well, yes, but I—”

“Do you know that council of Sterling’s tried to have my bar shut down last year?”

“Really?” Etta says, hoping she sounds shocked. The bar is clearly the kind of place where people go to drink until they’re ready to fight—the kind of place Charlie and Sameer would have appreciated, but not so much a city council.

“Really!” Pat smacks a fist down on the bar. “Here I am, a fine, upright, hard-working American just trying to get by—”

Sarah makes a noise that, on a lesser woman, Etta might have called a snort. “You sell Smoke to sailors coming in from the docks until they run out of coin and then you roll them out into the gutter, Pat.”

“Isn’t that what I was saying? And now they want to shut down an honest businessman like myself.” Pat turns to Etta. “What do you think of this Prohibition law, then, Miss Candy?”

“I don’t think it will stop a single soul from drinking if they’re determined enough,” Etta says, without stopping to think about how that will sound coming from a political candidate—if she even wants to be a candidate, which she’s not nearly as sure of as Sarah, thanks very much. Still, she can imagine how Steve Trevor’s smuggler friend, the one he called Chief, must have laughed when he heard that alcohol was about to become illegal in the United States. If there was any doubt about whether his business would dry up, as it were, after the Great War finished, the Eighteenth Amendment has neatly dispelled it. “Making it a crime to drink liquor is just going to turn a lot of ordinary people into criminals.”

“Oh, I like this one,” Pat murmurs to Sarah. “This is going to be a hell of a fight.”

“Etta isn’t afraid of Big Charlie.”

“I don’t mean for her. Here, give that over,” he says, reaching for one of the papers. “How many names do you need?”

“Two hundred, but you needn’t get all of them,” Sarah tells him. “I’ve got a few other places to try.”

“Not my competition, I hope. After all, a poor honest tradesman like myself—”

“Stop it, Pat,” Sarah said, swatting him on the arm and laughing. “And don’t worry. Our next stop most certainly is _not_ your competition.”

 

“Are you sure I’m allowed to be here?” Etta asks, just inside the church door. “I am a Protestant, after all.”

Sarah shrugs. “And you’re English, too, but nobody’s perfect. Hello, Father,” she calls out to the approaching priest. “Etta, this is Father Don. Father, Etta Candy. She’s running against Charles Sterling in the council election.”

“Is she now.” Father Don is a surprise to Etta. The man in the clerical collar is young and—well, this is troubling to admit, isn’t it?—rather handsome, with an open face and kind eyes. “And what platform will you be running on, Miss Candy?”

“Etta’s a Progressive,” Sarah cuts in, before Etta can explain that Sarah has barely given her a moment to think since she hatched this whole scheme. “An experienced organizer, too. She’s too modest to say, but she volunteered for a number of charities when she lived in London. That’s why I brought her to you, to talk about the orphanage. I thought she could make it part of her campaign.”

“Well, I was planning to start with buying a new wagon for the fire department and taking a survey to find which of the landlords aren’t in compliance with the new tenement laws,” Etta says, and doesn’t realize until the words are out that it’s exactly what she would do, given the chance. “But I’m sure that doesn’t interest you, Father.”

“The health and safety of my parish shouldn’t interest me?” Father Don says, raising an eyebrow.

 _Oh, excellent work, Etta, first you’ve upset Diana and now you’re insulting the clergy._ “I didn’t mean any offense,” she begins. “Only, well, I suppose I thought a priest would be more interested in saving souls than bodies. Things of this world, and all that.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that the people who tell us not to be concerned with the things of this world are usually the ones who are doing just fine for themselves in it,” Father Don says dryly. “I thought our Lord made His opinion clear enough when He healed the sick and multiplied the loaves and fishes. I’ve always thought it’s our job to care for bodies as well as souls, to ease suffering in this world anywhere we can.”

“Such as the orphanage,” Sarah supplies.

“Such as the orphanage. Of course, Miss Candy will have to get elected before she can do anything about that, won’t she? And I take it that’s why you’re here, Sarah.”

“Two hundred signatures,” Sarah says, holding out another stack of paper. “That’s what it takes to get a candidate on the ballot, Father.”

“You understand I can’t tell anyone it’s God’s will that they sign those papers.” Father Don’s expression is serious, but his eyes have a gleam that matches Sarah’s. “But I suppose I could offer a few of my parishioners a bit of guidance in this matter. And, Miss Candy, you’re always welcome if you’d like to join Sarah at Mass, Protestant or not.”

“Oh. Ah,” Etta begins, before she realizes that she really, really can’t lie to a priest on top of everything else. Father Don seems to know what she’s about to say, though, and nods.

“You wouldn’t be the first person to come through the last few years with your faith shaken, Miss Candy. Many of us saw things in the Great War that made us question all we thought we knew.”

“You have no idea,” Etta murmurs, thinking of the things Charlie and Sameer swore they saw that last night on the battlefield. If it had only been Charlie, poor man, she might have written off all the babbling about gods and magic, but Sameer, for all his dramatics, doesn’t lie unless he’s getting paid to do it. She’s not ready to abandon the Methodist church for Zeus and Artemis quite yet, but her faith was never that firmly rooted to begin with, and nowadays, _shaken_ is an excellent word for it.

“Well, I won’t try to convert you, or ask you to make confession,” Father Don says gently. “But if you ever want to talk about some of those things, keep me in mind. I make it a point never to turn anyone away.”

Etta manages to stammer her thanks, and the priest shakes her hand before Sarah leads the way out of the sanctuary. “Well, go on,” Sarah finally says.

“He’s certainly not what I thought of when you talked about your priest,” Etta admits. “I was expecting fire and brimstone, or at least some stern disapproval.”

Sarah smiles, the same crooked little grin she’s handed down to her son. “He wasn’t what I expected, either. When I walked through those doors, back in a church for the first time in too long with a husband I barely knew on my arm and a different man’s baby inside me, I was terrified. Joseph almost made me turn around, told me he was afraid I’d faint in the aisle before I made it to Confession. I might have listened to him if it hadn’t been so important to find a priest who could baptize Stevie. I never thought I might also be choosing the one who’d give Joseph his last rites.”

Her voice has nearly trailed off by the end, and Etta also goes quiet, feeling the vague unease she always does when the subject of Sarah’s dead husband comes up. It’s not easy to talk about Steve Trevor either, but at least Etta knows he was no saint, and Sarah knows it too. Joseph Rogers, though… Etta can’t quite put her finger on what she feels when his name gets mentioned, and frankly, it’s an emotion she doesn’t want to examine too closely. “So you’ve gotten your Pat and your Father Don in my corner,” she says, to change the subject. “Does that mean we can go home now?”

“Oh, no,” Sarah says, brightening. “Liquor and religion are out of the way, but we still haven’t talked about crime.”

 

“You do realize that I’m running for City Council in Brooklyn, I hope, seeing as you’re the one who filled out the paperwork,” Etta mutters, following Sarah through yet another doorway. “I really don’t see what good it could do to drag me all the way out to Manhattan.”

“So you _are_ running,” Sarah says, and Etta would throw up her hands in consternation if doing so wouldn’t put her life at risk. They’re skirting along the edges of a long, narrow room lined with tall windows on one side and shelves of glass chemical bottles on the other. A number of young men are hunched over tables, doing complicated-looking things with glass tubes and gas burners, but Sarah walks past them, going straight to an older man with a good suit under his white laboratory coat. There’s a metal tray on his table, containing something that looks unfortunately like raw liver from a butcher’s shop. Given that they’re standing in the medical examiner’s lab, Etta decides to believe that’s exactly what it is and there’s no more to be said about it.

If Sarah notices the tray’s contents, she doesn’t seem to be bothered. “Charles,” she greets him. “Thank you for seeing us. Etta, this is Dr. Norris.”

“Dr. Norris? This is Dr. Charles Norris?” Etta almost chokes. “Excuse us just a moment,” she says, pulling Sarah aside. “How are you on first-name terms with the medical examiner for all of New York City?”

“Why shouldn’t I be? I worked at Bellevue when I first came to the city, and I used to help him out with surgeries, I’ll have you know. It was a good job, too, until the other nurses caught on that Stevie was on the way. Then they told me a mother’s place was at home with her children,” Sarah says, with a grimace, “and that was that. But I thought Dr. Norris might remember me kindly, and he did, so here we are.” She turns back to him. “Sorry, Charles. Etta’s read about you in the papers, and she’s a bit star-struck, I think,” she resumes, in a confidential tone. Before Etta can sputter a denial, she plunges on with, “Don’t let that give you the wrong impression of her, though. She’s actually rather fearless, seeing as she’s running against Charlie Sterling for Brooklyn City Council.”

Etta would have to be a fool not to realize what Sarah’s up to by now, but she _is_ starting to get tired of being put up for display like a cake in a bakery window. “Yes, on the Progressive ticket,” she says, because if Sarah is actually going to make her do this, then by God, she can at least make a good big noise on behalf of the Suffragettes before she loses by a landslide. “But Sarah isn’t quite right about where I’d heard of you, Doctor. I remember you from the proposal you sent to the Council about how the coroner’s office needed to be modernized.”

“Modernized?” Norris snorts. He’s a big man with a graying beard, and the spark of fire in his eyes at that makes him look more like a fire-and-brimstone preacher than she imagines Father Don could ever look in his life. “At this rate, we’d be better off burning it to the ground and starting over. Do you know that before I came in, the coroner didn’t have to have any medical knowledge at all? This office was a political post, got dished out to any of the mayor’s friends who needed a job. Politicians, businessmen, real estate dealers—once even to a musician. And they weren’t even as bad as the few who were doctors and had lost their practice. Most of them would write anything down as the cause of death for a price, and once that’s done and the body’s buried, it’s damn hard for the police to argue. I saw one case where a man had been shot once in the head, once in the leg, and twice in the stomach. The death certificate called it a suicide.”

“Oh, surely not,” Etta begins, and then stops herself. Big Charlie Sterling isn’t quite that corrupt yet, but give him a few years and he might very well have his own crimes to cover up. “So murderers were going free because the city wouldn’t acknowledge there was a crime to prosecute?”

“‘Were’ seems like an optimistic word, Miss Candy,” Norris says grimly. “I’m doing as much as I can, but I only have so many men in my department, and they can barely keep up with the work here. And on top of that, I keep having to send them over to Brooklyn to follow up on work that wasn’t done properly the first time. There are murderers walking free right now because of how the Brooklyn coroner’s office is run. So tell me, Miss Candy—if you’re elected to the city council, do you think you can do something about it?”

Etta almost says yes without thinking about it. Because she wants to; of course she wants to. What stops her is the thought of all those men she led back to Big Charlie’s office, all the money that’s quietly changed hands there. Even if the city council votes to regulate the coroner’s office, they certainly won’t vote for someone independent to oversee the whole business. That would have to come from outside. That would have to be…

Sarah opens her mouth, and Etta knows what she’s going to say: _Help us get Etta elected and she’ll fix it, you’ll see._ And the worst part is, Sarah will believe it, even if Etta tells her that it’s impossible. Sarah prides herself on her honesty enough that Etta can’t let her lie again. She doesn’t know what she’s going to say until she hears herself blurt, “I don’t see why I should wait for the election.”

Sarah stops, startled, and Norris raises a bushy eyebrow. “What do you mean, Miss Candy?”

“I mean I’ll make it one of the things I talk about in my campaign,” Etta says. “I’ll make sure everyone in Brooklyn hears about this and why it’s important. And if I say it from a stage, it means the papers can cover what I said, even if they can’t find proof. If enough people get angry about it, the council will be forced to set up regulations that actually work.”

For a moment, Sarah looks at her with what Etta thinks is sincere admiration before she snaps back to attention. “Of course, we’ll have to get her on the ballot before anything can happen,” she says. “I know you don’t live in Brooklyn, Charles, but maybe you know some doctors who do, and who’d be willing to sign our petition.”

“Every medical man in Brooklyn will sign it if he knows what’s good for him,” Norris promises, taking the papers. “You’ve impressed me, Miss Candy. I hope you won’t let me down.”

Etta meets his eyes without hesitation, and says, “I don’t intend to.”

 

“Dr. Norris wasn’t the only one you impressed in there,” Sarah says, once they’ve left the office and are walking down the stairwell. “Not that I didn’t already know you’re brilliant, but that answer about the campaign speech was some wonderfully quick thinking.”

“You needn’t keep trying to flatter me, Sarah. I’ve already said I’ll go along with this mad idea of yours, at least until we see how many names you can get on that petition.”

“I’m not trying to flatter you,” Sarah protests. “I mean it, Etta.”

Etta has her doubts, but she says, “That’s sweet of you. Although from what I could tell, I’m not the only one.” When Sarah shoots her a puzzled look, she says, “It’s very clear that he has eyes for you, dearest.”

“Etta, don’t be silly. He’s a married man.”

“And that means he’s been struck blind?” Etta makes sure she keeps her tone light, just slightly teasing. “I doubt a man like that invites many people to call him Charles, much less every nurse who works for him.”

“Nonsense,” Sarah says, but her skin is too fair to hide her blush.

“You must have thought about it, though,” Etta presses. “Oh, not about him—as you said, he’s a married man—but about finding a man to take care of you.”

Sarah sighs. “I’ve been with two men and lost them both. I’m not sure I have the stomach to try again.”

“Well, they say third time’s lucky.” The words are out before Etta has time to think that they’re in extremely poor taste. “I didn’t mean that,” she amends. “I only meant that someone as young and pretty as you are wouldn’t have any trouble finding someone else, if that was what you wanted.”

When she doesn’t get a reply to that, Etta finally turns, only to find that Sarah is no longer beside her. She’s stepped out of the flow of traffic on the sidewalk, leaning against the rough bricks of a storefront, one hand pressed to her chest. For an awful moment, Etta thinks she can add “made Sarah Rogers cry” to her list of sins for the day. Then she hears the wheeze between the short sharp breaths, and hurries over to loop an arm around Sarah’s shoulders. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. It’s just—it’s asthma.” Sarah manages a long, shuddering breath before she says, “I’m all right, we can keep walking—”

“We can also sit down,” Etta says, taking Sarah’s arm and steering her toward the nearest bench. “You should have said something earlier, dearest. I had no idea.”

“It’s _nothing._ I’ve had it—since I was Stevie’s age. That’s—where he got it, from me. Although mine was—never as bad as his.” Her breathing seems to get a little easier once she sits down, but Etta isn’t reassured. “Mostly it doesn’t bother me. It was all those stairs, and then the smell of all those chemicals, I think. I’m fine to keep going. We’ve got other people to see—”

“All of whom will wait,” Etta says. “After all, if you fall down dead in the street, I’ll never get all those petitions signed. Really, you're taking a rest in the cause of women’s liberation.”

Sarah huffs out as much of an offended breath as she can manage. “A _short_ rest,” she negotiates. “I’ll sit for ten minutes and then I’ll be fine.”

“All right,” Etta says, “but I’m setting my watch. If you’re still breathing like that in ten minutes, we’re going to do something about it.”

Twenty-five minutes later—because Sarah managed to argue her way into five more minutes no less than three times without getting noticeably better, and see if Etta makes that mistake again—Sarah is sitting on a stool at the counter of a corner drugstore, looking grimly down at a small yellow box labeled _Potter’s Asthma Cigarettes._ “You’re going to make me do this, are you?”

“Dearest, I’m not going to make you do anything,” Etta says calmly. “But if you don’t, we’ve not only wasted money on this medicine, but Diana will be very worried when I tell her all about it.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Henrietta Candy,” Sarah mutters, sliding one of the cigarettes out of the packet. Etta is just realizing they don’t have any matches when a voice says, “I’ve got it,” and the young boy who’s been lurking behind the counter pushes himself up on his toes and holds out a cigarette lighter.

Sarah frowns, although she has no choice but to touch the tip of the cigarette to the flame. “Are you old enough to be playing with fire, young man?”

“I’m _seven,”_ the boy says, in the aggrieved tone only a very small child can achieve, before disappearing behind the counter again.

Sarah smiles after him, then takes a long drag off the cigarette, holding the smoke in her lungs for as long as she can before she lets it out with a deep, ragged cough. “Ugh. I swear, this is one of those times when the cure is worse than the disease. Those things are _terrible.”_

“It’s the belladonna,” the boy says, popping his head up again. “That’s what makes them taste so bad.”

“Good Lord, Sarah,” Etta says, completely forgetting herself. “Isn’t that a poison?”

“Everything’s poisonous if you get too much of it,” the boy informs her solemnly. “Even water.”

“Howard, what have I said about bothering the customers?” the pharmacist says sharply, from the other end of the counter.

“Oh, he’s no bother,” Sarah says, waving the cigarette dismissively. If Etta thinks that makes her look like a film star, she keeps quiet about it. “I’m sure mine will be twice as bad when he learns to talk. Do you help your father in the shop every day, Howard?”

“He’s my uncle,” Howard says. “But I’m allowed to come here and learn things as long as I don’t cause trouble. I like chemicals. They’re _interesting.”_

“Will you be a chemist when you’ve grown up, then?”

“No,” Howard says firmly. “I’m going to be an engineer. I’m going to build airplanes that can fly all the way around the world.”

“A plan that starts with taking apart a very expensive soda fountain, it seems,” the pharmacist says darkly.

Howard looks offended. “I put it _back,_ Uncle Anthony. And it even works better now. You said so.”

“Which doesn’t make it all right that you took it apart,” the pharmacist says, with no real malice. But it’s given Etta an idea.

“Howard,” she says, “does your uncle let you make drinks with the soda machine? Because, you know, I don’t believe I’ve ever had one of these egg creams I keep hearing so much about.”

“Can I?” Howard immediately begs, and the pharmacist gives him a little _go ahead_ wave, as if he knows the futility of argument. Etta fishes a nickel out of her dwindling supply of coins and slides it across the counter, then goes back to watching Sarah try to hold the medicated smoke in her lungs without coughing. Soon enough, the boy is back, carefully handing over a glass of something foamy and sweet, and Etta pushes it toward Sarah. “Here,” she says. “We’ll split it. Maybe it’ll help kill the taste.”

“Etta, you know I don’t want you spending money on me, especially now, when you need it for yourself,” Sarah protests, but eventually she leans forward and takes a tiny sip. “Oh, that is good,” she admits, and smiles, leaning forward confidentially. “You see,” she says, “I don’t need a man to take care of me, Etta. I’ve got you.”

Etta has no idea what she’s supposed to say to that, but she picks up the glass and takes a quick drink to hide her blush. The egg cream, as far as she can tell, doesn’t actually have any egg or cream in it, but looking across the counter at Sarah, she thinks that it’s been a long time since she had anything so sweet.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...Just call her Sarah "there's no rule that says a dog can't play basketball" Rogers.
> 
> Anyway, hi, friends! I aten't ded, and neither is this weird labor-of-love of a story, but I have no defense about how long it's taken me to get more of it down on paper.
> 
> We have some characters now, at least! Dr. Norris is a real person stolen directly from _The Poisoner's Handbook,_ and I'm RPFing him without apology because I still don't know all the details of where this fic is going but I know it's going to feature murder, you guys, _so much murder._
> 
> More Diana in the next chapter.


End file.
